A new publication strategy for Topoi

At the end of 2013, the Excellence Cluster Topoi founded its own publishing company and thereby completely overhauled its publication concept once again in the second funding phase. It was no easy step, but it was a necessary step into a new dimension of scientific publishing: “Edition Topoi will offer far more than the ‘classical book‘,” promise the spokespersons for the cluster, Gerd Graßhoff and Michael Meyer. Traditional publishing structures – from the manuscript to the printed book – are combined with and complemented by a novel digital research platform. This offers an innovative research environment adapted to the needs of the scientific community. Open Access, effective networking of digital resources, citable electronic research data, barrier-free international availability and immediate scientific impact – these are the driving forces by which Edition Topoi is assuming a leading role in modern scientific communication.

Edition Topoi will offer far more than the ‘classical book‘

Gerd Graßhoff and Michael Meyer

Works are published in Edition Topoi under creative commons licenses. This is also new, and a clear movement against the exclusive publishers’ contracts and one-sided financial interests that have so far restricted authors in the handling of their own intellectual property. The research platform www.edition-topoi.org currently offers unrestricted open access to around 120 scientific papers of the online journal eTopoi as well as the series “Berlin Studies of the Ancient World”, and more will follow. The platform is currently being expanded to allow also the publication of digital repositories.

In the cluster´s regularly newsletter Neotopia Gerd Graßhoff gave a detailed interview on the new publication strategy of the Excellence Cluster Topoi: